Passion drives innovation: AR and VR founders survey reveals new trends
Here are the top trends that emerged from our survey:
- Women are starting to play larger leadership roles in technology and innovation.
- Data reveals passion drives entrepreneurship, not technical skills.
- Technical skills guarantee employability.
- Companies need to invest in training their workforce in both soft and hard skills/
- Leadership development is a big concern and priority. Emotional intelligence is a must for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders, management and employees.
- Many U.S. VR and AR companies are starting to look outside of the USA to hire.
See the full story here: http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/29/passion-drives-innovation-ar-and-vr-founders-survey-reveals-new-trends/
Pokemon Go crosses 4.2mn download mark after three days of official launch in South Korea
The number of people in South Korea who used the popular augmented reality game “Pokemon Go” in a single day has surpassed 4.2 million just three days after its official launch in the country, according to a survey.
WiseApp, an app analytics company, said on Friday that 4.28 million people used the AR mobile game on Thursday, up from 2.91 million people on Tuesday when Pokemon Go was officially released in the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store in South Korea, Yonhap reported.
WiseApp also said the number of people who have downloaded the game fell to 850,000 on Thursday, down from 2.83 million people on Tuesday, citing its sample survey of 17,400 smartphone users.
See the full story here: http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/pokemon-go-crosses-4-2mn-download-mark-after-three-days-of-official-launch-in-south-korea-359714.html
Augmented reality helps interpret gunnery commands
The Navy has successfully demonstrated a prototype for a new command communications system that could help sailors work more effectively amid the noise and confusion of combat.
Watch a nightclub shooting in virtual reality? For Rose Troche, painful subjects make for powerful art
“It’s really important to me to test the parameters of how to create sustainable narratives in VR,” Troche says, adding that the sooner a cohesive language to describe it emerges, including critics who understand and employ that language, the sooner that feat will be accomplished.
Actors, too, will need to relearn their craft if VR is to flourish. Actors are never off camera in a 360-degree film, unless they physically leave the room. It’s almost like being in a play, only, unlike with theater, actors in VR need to understate everything. The more they project in VR, the more false they look.
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The new work, “If Not Love,” is a short piece that takes the viewer on a painful, 360-degree journey through a mass shooting at a gay nightclub. “If Not Love” isn’t intended to re-create last year’s Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla., but the project was inspired by that incident as well as by the tragedy in Nice, France, when a truck plowed through a crowd at a Bastille Day celebration.
In both cases, Troche wondered if anything could have been done to stop the violence.
“If Not Love” explores that thought by following the story of a closeted gay man who, after an anonymous hookup, decides to carry out a shooting at a nightclub. The piece presents an alternate scenario where, instead of letting him leave after sex, the man’s partner asks him to stay. The two men kiss and hold each other, while back at the nightclub the bodies on the ground suddenly rise up in reverse of the falls they took in the shooting.
See the full story here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-sundance-updates-watch-a-nightclub-shooting-in-virtual-1485469643-htmlstory.html
Virtualitics launches software that immerses viewers in complex models of data
On Thursday, Virtualitics LLC will launch its business that brings together data visualization and virtual reality. Its technology, which uses machine learning to summarize data patterns, is based on research done at the nearby California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Scientists there teamed up with video-gaming veterans who are helping Virtualitics develop user-friendly tools in virtual reality.
Pasadena-based Virtualitics has developed machine learning algorithms that help an analyst determine which factors will provide the best possible mapping. For example with ETFs, the machine picks volatility and expense ratio as the most important factors to consider.
The program then creates a multidimensional data representation. It uses natural-language processing to write a paragraph that helps interpret what the image means for people who don’t have data-science backgrounds.
Virtualitics declined to identify all its backers by name but said a London-based financial institution, a South American retail group and several individuals invested in a $3 million seed round.
One investor, Andy Walter, a former chief information officer with Procter & Gamble, acts as an adviser.
See the full story here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/virtual-realitys-next-frontier-is-visuals-for-data-science-1485433801
Is virtual reality the antidote to help depressed seniors?
Researchers in different parts of the country are looking into how VR can be prescribed to elderly patients to rehabilitate them from things like strokes, treat depression, dementia and anxiety, and serve as an escape from their hospital or hospice beds.
Lora Appel, a researcher with OpenLab at Toronto General Hospital, has been focusing her VR research efforts on seniors with dementia. Some of these patients don't get to go outside much because they like to wander — and that can be dangerous.
Her hope is to use VR as a tool to take them outdoors virtually and cut down on the wandering.
"I have no doubt this will improve quality of life," she said.
Appel's team has yet to test the technology with seniors, but she and her colleagues are well into the research phase and hope to roll out a pilot project by the end of the summer.
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It's a new concept for Canadians, but some in the U.S. have already been experimenting with VR-like experiences for seniors, like Aerial Anthropology, a Cleveland, Ohio-based film production company that specializes in flying drones for hospice patients.
The drone flights are streamed live for patients on a large screen, showing them a meaningful location of their choice — like the family home or a park they used to go to as a kid. The visuals have brought up many memories for patients and their families.
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Instead, they have some seniors try out different types of virtual reality without the headsets, like a driving simulator and a virtual reality motion-capture machine called CAREN (Computer-Assisted Rehabilitation Environment), which helps seniors with severe physical injuries learn to walk again.
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"It is a forgotten demographic and that's why we really think it is an important demographic," he said.
See the full story here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/virtual-reality-seniors-1.3950196
Can Virtual Reality Fight Fake News?
As Americans on all sides of the issues mobilized and protested this past weekend, the Ryot Girls had their biggest task yet: record the 
protests, format them for virtual reality (VR), and pump them—ASAP—to Facebook's 360 platform, where they will live, as the Shark Tank team says, in perpetuity. (If you can't handle the 40-minute live-stream, a 4-minute recap of the day's events is available on YouTube in both virtual reality and 2-D formats.)
"We decided to have an all-woman crew," managing editor Averie Timm says, "because we felt like these protests [before, during, and after] the Women's March are some of the most historic moments for feminists in our lifetime. What better way to cover it than with an all-female team?"
See the full story here: http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a42327/virtual-reality-protests/